Open government data for 100 cities worldwide
Description
This data extends data taken from the LSE global Urban Governance Survey. It adds 27 new cities to the 73 cities in the LSE data set that had complete information. It also adds variables on smart city initiatives, which are collected either by survey or from publicly-available sources. We also validated and completed the data in the LSE data set wherever possible. The purpose of the data set is to allow exploration of the interaction between city features and smart city initiatives.
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Steps to reproduce
First, we use the data gathered from the global Urban Governance Survey, conducted by the London School of Economics and Political Science (LSE) Cities in partnership with UN-Habitat and United Cities and Local Governments. The survey is available at https://urbangovernance.net/en/, and we refer to it as the LSE dataset. This dataset includes information on the governance structures of 127 cities and serves as the primary source for constructing our independent variables. However, it does not contain information on smart city initiatives. We administer a supplementary survey (2021–2022) to a targeted list of stakeholders in 371 cities (127 cities in LSE dataset and 244 additional cities). The list includes mayors, urban planning department managers, deputy mayors, city managers, city board members, and other relevant officials.The survey replicates selected questions from the LSE dataset and asks also about smart city initiatives in the cities. Next, we manually collected data from publicly available sources, such as city council and municipal websites, to validate factual information in the LSE dataset and to obtain information about our dependent variables if it was not already obtained through the survey. and included new items on smart city initiatives. Despite an 8% response rate, this effort added 27 new cities to the initial 73 cities in the LSE dataset and also helped to find information about the smart city types for those 73 cities. Next, we manually collected data from publicly available sources, such as city council and municipal websites, to validate factual information in the LSE dataset and to obtain information about our dependent variables if it was not already obtained through the survey. This multi-stage process resulted in a final dataset of 100 cities. Table A1 in the appendix lists these cities. They are distributed across 54 countries, with the largest share located in Europe (41%), grouped into six world regions as shown in the same table.